#religion

I think this is a very important thing to understand about Christianity. It was from its very beginnings, it seems, a religion of great quarrels and wars, and it wooed the power of temporal authorities, and made them part of itself in the hope of resolving through sheer force its many arguments. ↗

— Anne Rice

#power #religion

When the subject is sacred, proud and clever men may come to think that the outsiders who don't know it are not merely inferior to them in skill but lower in God's eyes; as the priests said, 'All that rabble who are not experts in the Torah are accursed.' and as this pride increases, the 'subject' or study which confers such privilege will grow more and more complicated, the list of things forbidden will increase, till to get through a single day without supposed sin becomes like an elaborate step-dance, and this horrible network breeds self-righteousness in some and haunting anxiety in others. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#reflections-on-the-psalms #religion #self-righteousness #men

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#god #religion #religious #walt-whitman #religion

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female. ↗

— Barbara W. Tuchman

#barbara-tuchman #catholic-church #christianity #religion #religion

No doubt, God took a risk with creation by granting it consciousness and free decision. ↗

— Eliezer Berkovits

#judaism #religion #religion

The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains. ↗

— Stendhal

#religion

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#christianity #compassion #guilt #immorality #justice

But, above all, it will confer an inestimable benefit on morality and religion, by showing that all the objections urged against them may be silenced for ever by the Socratic method, that is to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector. ↗

— Immanuel Kant

#religion

but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist. ↗

— Charles Williams

#religion

The worship of power is an old religion. ↗

— George Santayana

#religion #wisdom #religion